During the production of hydrocarbons, the hydrocarbons and other by-products flow from the wells drilled into the reservoir to storage facilities or a processing plant. The pipelines and other installations required for this transport are usually referred to as tieback. The flow of hydrocarbon is subject to changing environmental conditions such as changing temperature, pressure, and composition. The changing conditions often cause the precipitation of components out of the main flow.
In this context, management of changing phases like liquids, gases and solids precipitation can be regarded as being fundamental for the assurance of fluid flow along the production systems. Organic (hydrates, waxes, Asphaltenes, naphthanates) or inorganic solids (BaSO4, CaCO3, SrCO3) may obstruct the formation pores and deposit on the wellbore or pipeline walls blocking the fluid production.
In the oil and gas industry, studies are developed to analyze the flow conditions and operations procedures throughout the life of the field. The objective of those studies is to understand the environment, boundary conditions and property changes along the fluid journey from the pore volume of the reservoir to process facilities and point of sales.
To characterize the production, the oil and gas industry is recently focusing, particularly for large subsea developments, on intelligent field solutions and new systems for production control and monitoring as for example presented in: Gudimetla, A. Carroll, K. Havre, C. Christiansen, and J. Canon, “Gulf of Mexico Field of the Future: Subsea Flow Assurance”, OTC 18388, 2006 and G. G. Lunde, K. Vannes, O. T. McClimans, C. Burns, and K. Wittmeyer, “Advanced Flow Assurance System for the Ormen Lange Subsea Gas Development”, OTC 20084, 2009. These recent systems for production management are designed to assist decision making and to provide guidance for the daily operations and future investments. They can perform model-based simulations to represent the production conditions and address potential issues. Generally these systems attempt to address flow assurance problems.
The model-based simulations represent reservoirs, wells, pipelines, production networks and facilities. Those models range from “black oil” to compositional and from steady state to transient. When calibrated with available measurement data as proposed for example in J. Ratulowski, A. Amin, A. Hammami, M. Muhammad, M. Riding, “Flow Assurance and Subsea Productivity Closing the Loop with Connectivity and Measurements”, SPE 90244-MS, 2004 or by A. Amin, E. Smedstad, M. Riding, “Role of Surveillance in Improving Subsea Productivity”, SPE 90209-MS, 2004 and laboratory fluid characterization data such as illustrated in: A. K. M. Jamaluddin, J. Nighswander, N. Joshi, “A Systematic Approach in Deepwater Flow Assurance Fluid Characterization”, SPE 71546-MS, 2001, such models can be used to estimate fluid properties throughout the system.
Software tools to assist the assessment of potential flow assurance problems are commercially available by many vendors and include for example steady-state fluid flow simulators such as PIPESIM™, transient fluid flow simulators such as OLGA™, fluid analysis software designed to predict the thermodynamic precipitation point of waxes and asphaltenes such as dbrSOLIDS™, and integrated asset modeler simulators such as Avocet™ IAM capable of modeling the fluid flow from the reservoir through to refining stages. Those tools allow production engineers to understand potential system problems, such as flow restrictions due to solids precipitation and deposition.
The use of the model-based simulation to create operation profiles is well known in the industry, these profiles are used to evaluate the risk of solids precipitation and deposition along the flow path. However in the light of the known methods it is seen as an object of the present invention to provide a method of monitoring different types of possible solids from each fluid footprint, and at different timeframes.